Do you have better things to do than scour the internet for news? No problem! If you need to know what's important for the developer, IProgrammer Weekly puts the unmissable bits together in a handy digest together with the week's books and articles, which this time are an explanation of a Turing Machine and cover the workings of the JavaScript dispatch queue.

News

A team of students from the University of Washington has won the inaugural Alexa Prize and presented a cheque for $500,000 at AWS re:Invent. The $1 million prize for being able to sustain a conversation for 20 minutes wasn't won on this occasion.

With the advent of Single Page Applications, scraping pages for information as well as running automated user interaction tests has become much harder due to its highly dynamic nature. The solution? Headless Chrome and the Puppeteer library.

The new slogan for the Imagine Cup is "Code With Purpose" and it is now underway. For 2018 there are new awards for Big Data, AI and Virtual/Augmented reality apps. Teams are encouraged to make an early start on their projects by pitching their ideas the Big Idea Challenge before January 31st.

This round up of Python-related items gathered from bog posts and external websites indicates the versatility of this popular language and has tips both for beginners and for more experienced Python programmers.

Microsoft has released a preview of a free tool for managing SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. SQL Operations Studio provides wider options than the Windows-only SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and runs on Linux and macOS as well as Windows.

AWS (Amazon Web Service) introduced a Midnight Madness event to get it's annual re:Invent conference off to an early start. The first announcement was Amazon Sumerian providing assets for building VR/AR apps as a service.

Last month Google made another of its in-house data science tools freely available for anyone to use. Colaboratory is a document collaboration tool that has the ability to run code and show its output within the document. It is another step towards making AI and data accessible to all.

The three prize winners of a contest to build connected devices powered by Android Things are impressively innovative, diverse, and relevant. They are a great showcase for what can be achieved with low cost hardware together with Android Things.

The universe can be viewed as a huge physical computer that has been running for 13.7 billion . The outcome of its program is the way it is. Does the universe actually have the power it needs, or does it need to use clever algorithms?

Amazon has released an open source library for interacting with cloud services that use JavaScript applications. The AWS Amplify library is organized into a number of categories, with more planned for the future.

The Core

The workings of the JavaScript dispatch queue are more subtle and interesting than you might think. Far from just being a queue of events, there are tasks and then there are sub-tasks. This is an extract from Ian Elliot's latest book in the I Programmer Library JavaScript Async.

Babbage's Bag

The Turing machine can compute anything that can be computed. It is the very definition of computation and the fundamental tool for reasoning about computers. You really need to know what it is all about. Here is an illustrated guide.